WASHINGTON: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday signalled a tentative deal with China to de-escalate their damaging, tariff-fueled trade war – just days before a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Bessent said the US threat of a 100 percent tariff hike on Chinese goods had effectively been taken off the table in exchange for Beijing deferring curbs on its global rare earth exports.
“The tariffs will be averted,” Bessent said after wrapping up talks with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.
On the export controls, China will “delay that for a year while they reexamine it,” Bessent said.
Trump starts key Asian tour with deals ahead of China meet
The secretary’s remarks came as Trump kicked off an Asia tour in Kuala Lumpur that will culminate in a sitdown with Xi in South Korea.
Bessent said he expected the two leaders to formally announce the deal at their summit.
The secretary said Beijing had also agreed on “substantial” purchases from US farmers, who are a key source of domestic political support for Trump and have been massively impacted by the tariff row between the two countries.
China, once the biggest buyer of US soybean exports, simply halted all orders as the trade dispute took hold.
“I believe, when the announcement of the deal with China is made public, that our soybean farmers will feel very good,” Bessent said.
The secretary said the two sides had also thrashed out a “final deal” over the US version of the wildly popular Chinese social media app TikTok, which boasts around 170 million US users.
Citing national security concerns, Washington has sought to wrest TikTok’s US operations from the hands of Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order that would place control in the hands of a group of US investors – many of them close allies of the president.
“All the details are ironed out, and that will be for the two leaders to consummate that transaction on Thursday in Korea,” Bessent told CBS’s “Face the Nation” in a separate interview.
The talks in Kuala Lumpur also touched on the fentanyl trade – a lasting source of friction with Washington accusing Beijing of turning a blind eye to trafficking in the powerful opioid, something it denies.
“We agreed that the Chinese would begin to help us, with the precursor chemicals for this terrible fentanyl epidemic that’s ravaging our country,” Bessent said.
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